To find out more, visit www.HearForm.com

To Subscribe, click here: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=hearform




To find out more, visit www.HearForm.com

This video will provide some tips for advanced letter modification.

Let's create a letter that has more than just text on it.

I'm going to start by going to the letters module and I'll choose a marketing piece.

And I'll choose marketing letter number 20.

But before I do that, I'll click this button up here in the upper right and name that something silly like advanced letter.

Of course, you might put open house or May is better hearing month or anything else that you want for that letter title.

But I've just changed that so that we can find it a bit easier.

And as you can see, when I go into layout mode, I'll edit the layout up here.

Now I have some tools on the far right that I'll slide over so you can see.

These different, I don't use this 1 as much but this area in particular I'm going to use to help format the text and some other things like that.

Perhaps the first thing I want to do is get my text tool because I'm going to play some text here.

Now, I'm going to make this a little bit too small just to show you that the letter goes down a little ways.

And I'm also showing under view, I'm also showing the page margins.

Otherwise it might just look like this and you might think it's a wide letter but in fact when we preview the letter it will look like a normal 8.5 by 11 letter but we can view those page margins and sometimes page breaks if it's a multi-page letter.

So what I want to do now that I have my text tool here, I can lock that or not but I'm going to highlight here where it says insert text here it may say something else and I'm just going to paste what I have on my clipboard.

Let's say I copied this from a word document I had or I can just start typing whatever I want the letter to be but I've already prepared something so I'll paste that and as you can see I now have some text there.

So if I just want to save my change before doing anything else, let's go ahead and exit the layout, save the change.

And now when I preview the letter, It will look, let's back up just a little bit, it will look something like this.

Your letterhead automatically appears at the top based on the assigned office location.

Today's date will appear at the top unless you've overridden that in a special date field.

The patient's name as it's calculated, whether it says the salutation, whether it's their nickname or full name or whatever it is, will automatically appear here with a second street address if there is 1.

Then we start our letter, and at the bottom, the assigned audiologist or dispenser is automatically there as I scroll through a few letters here.

You can see that that information will automatically change.

By the way, even here, because I've set up the clinician name with a lot of 2 extra lines it's showing, as you can see right there.

So let's exit the preview and go back into the layout mode.

And what I wanna do is I'm gonna zoom in just a little bit so that you can see what I'm doing a little bit better.

So let's say, and this is just sample text, but let's say I want to make this right here bold.

Well, I could right-click and change the style to bold right there.

If you like keyboard shortcuts, I press Control-Shift-B and there are a number of other ways of looking at things.

So under the format menu, I can look under style, and it actually tells me what some of these keyboard shortcuts are.

I find those very helpful to underline, to italicize, to make bold, or plain text.

So let's go ahead and do this, and I'll just select this line and press ctrl shift B and I can press ctrl shift greater than less than symbols to make that text larger.

It's very similar to coming here and changing the size from 12 to 18 or whatever it is.

So now we have that looking a little bit better and the reason I am giving myself some space over here is that I want to put a photograph and unlike Word which does a great job or can do a great job of wrapping text around images, FileMaker does not offer that option at this point.

So we're going to have to kind of auto wrap things and make sure it doesn't get in the way.

Now keep in mind that these lines up here, at least this part right here is fluid.

For example, you may have 2 lines even here it may be a care of and it may bump something down to the next line if you have multiple street addresses it could be 2 or 3 or 4 lines so this is going to slide up or down and you just want to keep that in mind if you're going to be placing objects like an image on the screen.

Let's save our change, exit, and if I messed up I could say don't save.

Please don't check this box here because I'd like you to have the option to always save or not save.

So we'll save and once again if we preview that then we see all I've done so far really is just change that to a larger font and bold.

Let's put a photograph right here and I'll show you how to do that.

We'll exit preview and go back into edit layout and I'm going to come up here to this menu called insert where I can insert a lot of different things but I want to insert a picture.

So we'll click on that, navigate to the folder right there and you may get a warning that the image is too large and it's going to make your whole layout too large And that may just be the case so you'd have to make things smaller after you paste the picture in to make sure everything fits On 1 page in this case the picture is much bigger than I want it to be I'm going to grab not the text tool Which is locked but the arrow tool so I can click on the object the image And I'm going to hold the shift key down while I drag that corner.

What that does is it keeps it in proportion.

Otherwise, I can make it distorted as you see there.

Control Z puts it back to the way it was before.

So control, excuse me, shift and then drag that corner arrow, that corner box I should say.

And let's say we're going to put that image right here.

Now again, it may or may not be large enough for you, so maybe make it a little bit larger.

So you just want it to be the right proportions.

And without doing anything else, let's go ahead and once again, exit our layout.

Preview just to see how that's going to look.

We have a signature on there, our text, the address area.

And I can start doing all kinds of things.

Not that it necessarily would look good but you can determine that for yourself.

So I can come up here and this video is not meant to be an exhaustive lesson on how to use FileMaker.

There's hours and hours of training that you might need for that.

But I'm going to just put a box, even though, again, this may not look good to you.

What I did is just took that tool and the fill over here is set to none.

If I send it to color, then it's kind of a solid.

And that's OK if I send it to back under the Arrange menu.

And now I have a, for example, if I wanted to color that something like that, that was too far back, I think.

I didn't do something right, so let me move that picture here.

And I think I sent it too far back, and the text block is solid.

It's good when I make mistakes because you can see that you can make them too.

We'll bring that forward and there's that text block.

So I shouldn't have probably sent it all the way to the back because the text block itself, that brings up a good point.

None would make it basically see-through.

But a solid color, let's just change that for a second, a solid color means that it's going to hide anything behind it.

And since I took this box and put it at the back, then I couldn't see it anymore.

So what I'm going to do is just put that back to white and this is in front of it so we'll just leave that as white or put that back to white and then this is at the very front if you're not quite sure you can come up here to a range and make sure you bring that to the front although it looks good now And really that just took about 2 minutes, I'm sorry, to show you that you can create a little box around an image.

Now I'm moving these with the arrow keys on my keyboard.

You might find that a lot easier than moving it with the mouse which isn't as precise.

So you can kind of position those just right and you know I'm centering it in this box which I may or may not want to keep.

When I do that you can also see how far it is from the left, from the top in the number of pixels.

I may have told you in another video that you can change that from inches, centimeters, and points or pixels.

I prefer pixels because it's very precise for me.

So you may want to change that if it says something other than PT there.

So I can reposition those with this little area here, and I can even resize something.

Right now it says the image itself is 203 pixels by

If I wanted to cut that in half, I could change that to

let's say, by 68 or whatever that would be for for the width and that way it would keep the proportion I'll just show you real quick as I change that notice that the numbers change They're still in proportion and I'll press ctrl Z and bring it right back once again Let's exit the layout save our change and preview and then we get a slightly different letter there.

Let's mess this up deliberately going back into layout mode.

We'll get rid of that, get rid of, actually I'll keep the box for another reason.

Can't hardly see it here, but I may want to on occasion, I'm going to get rid of some of this text.

So I'm going to just say, let's get rid of all this right here, just for our purposes.

And I'm going to now take the text block, as you can see, and make that quite a bit more narrow.

Because I wanna take this, this is just an example, look at some marketing pieces that are out there that you really think are good, and you can kind of build things.

Now the color scheme isn't going to look very good.

I understand that it's not about color on this video.

But I'll just kind of choose a lavender or whatever color that is.

And once again, let me just save my change so you can see where we're at.

When we preview that, then I can see, okay, I've got my letter on the left and I've got this box here.

So again, this isn't about the quality of how something looks.

You may just say, I don't like that at all.

So by clicking here and over here, this is where I set the fill color or the line color.

And then I can even decide what sides of the object has a line on it or not.

I can say all or none or just part, et cetera.

But right now, I'm going to just say none.

But the benefit of using a large photo is it's going to be high resolution.

And if you make that photo smaller, the high resolution part stays there.

It's still big so it's going to take up more space on the size of your hear form file, but that's okay.

Now you may want to be saying here's a hearing aid expert that's coming to our office or this is who we are and we look forward to X, Y, and Z.

But you understand what I'm doing is just showing you objects.

Scroll over to the right just a little bit and then I can get another text block.

This is more info and I'm going to press 3 periods.

I have a bad habit of capitalizing that second letter.

So you can then put that text here and put in a whole bunch of text underneath.

So let's just grab a little bit of this since it already exists.

I'm pressing control Z and then it lines up with the previous font instead of the current font rather than the previous font I should say.

This is a sans-serif font, something that doesn't have these fancy parts on them.

And a serif font like Arial or Helvetica or something might look nice to have a slightly different look off to the side.

So again, this may not be a good looking letter.

But you can see that you can customize things quite a bit.

So let's look, I wasn't planning on doing this, but let's just look real quick here.

I can insert, let's not worry about parts now, But a field would be if I want to put an actual, let's just do it, and I'll show you what I mean.

I can insert a field, but generally this is not going to be something that you do.

I'm going to put in name first, for example.

So I put an actual field on there, and that's going to look a little odd.

I guess I'll just put it right there and let's fill that with a color.

By default I believe those are not filled in.

And let's center that so I can press the control key and kind of slash key and that puts it in the center or you can come up here to format and you can align your text center, top, center, whatever it is.

Now again, that just kind of cuts things off because it's, but you see it's right there.

That's Jennifer the patient, Doris, Sarah.

The point is that you'd never really put the patient's name on top of a picture, but I just wanted you to see you could put a field on there anywhere you want.

But the problem is that is an actual field and you can actually interact with it and put information into it there.

But you'll see that we generally use these merge fields.

You can't, or interactive I should say, You can't put information into them, but it does merge and it flows with the actual text.

I'm going to save my change, even though I shouldn't because It's a pretty ugly letter now.

But you get the idea now on how you can customize by adding pictures and text and playing with different things.

Let's go look at another marketing piece called New Technology.

And I'll show you a couple of merge fields I have in here.

So right here, as I scroll down a little bit, we have a dear name reading calc, which is dear Mary, dear Bob, dear Mr.

Smith, whatever you've calculated it to say.

According to our records, this merge field marks the anniversary of your merge field fitting.

Now of course you can tell what that is, and you don't have to have it bold.

I have it bold right here just to make it stand out for our purposes.

It may look a little kind of robotic if you have it bold because then a patient who's sophisticated may say, well that's just a merge field and you're not really personalizing this letter for me much.

But anyway, it says according to our records, this date marks the anniversary of your YDX, Phonak, Savanto, Starkey, Resound, whoever it is, and then it will put in the Alera 5 or the Deo or whatever it is right into the circuit.

So let's just look at that in regular mode.

According to our records, this date marks the anniversary of your and you can see if there's nothing there, then there's nothing to merge.

But it will put all that information right into the letter, and that makes it a little bit easier.

And then down below, oh, I should show you how to put that in before I continue.

So to insert a merge field, I'm going to say, here's some good news for you, and then it tells you something else.

But I'm going to insert something that just doesn't make sense in a letter.

But I'm going to say your birthday is and then I'm going to insert a birth date.

So, I should say your birth date, even though this is somewhat nonsensical.

So your birth date is, and then I'm going to insert, this is how we put a merge field on there, that's very important.

So I always press control M because it's so easy, but control M for merge, it helps me remember it.

And then you have to know the name of the field that you want.

Well, I'll show you if I can remember how to find the exact name of a field back on the home screen or some other layouts, you're basically just gonna look in layout mode and see what the field name is.

Well, in this case, it's not birth date, it's date of birth.

But even then, we have a few date of birth fields based on what other vendors have requested from us.

But the 1 we use most often and the 1 that's on the home screen you would see after looking at it is simply called date of birth with no spaces so all that to say let's insert that and then an exclamation point afterwards But this Chevron as it's called greater than less than symbol to starting ones to ending ones there and the text in the middle is a merge field So let's save our change Take a look here and your birthday is May 3rd.

Your birthday is April 4th or whatever it is.

This is again silly, birth month is, and then Control M will bring that up if I did that right, I didn't.

Control M, I don't know why that's not working.

So I want to look at date of birth month.

Well, I'd hardly ever use that, but maybe your date of birth month is this.

So I can also highlight just the first, I can highlight the whole thing, but this is a little tip.

Sometimes you don't have room for all this to fit on your layout just right and what you can do is highlight everything after the first chevron and make it smaller.

So I'll do that manually over here but I can make that size 6.

It's like wow that's really small I could barely see that but as I zoom in but as long as the first chevron is still the the size you want your font to be, then it's going to be okay.

And then I can also say, I want this style to be bold.

Even though the rest of it's not bold, it should be okay.

Your birth month is 5 because that's May.

And even though, see it's a very short number, but the merge field is much longer.

There may be times that you want to make your sentence be a little bit smaller by making the text shorter.

So down here we have you have just received the new new technology hearing aid.

Well in this case you may want to have a form somewhat flexible so let's zoom out just a little bit and then up here off to the side I have a new technology letter and so this says resound links to but I could change that to Phonak Audeo or whatever it is so now we have Phonak Audeo and by the way I understand if you're watching this video in the future when you'll say the Phonak Audeo that was a long time that's when President Trump was in office but at any rate I understand but you put whatever whatever circuit that you want there that you're going to be presenting and that way that letter flows and changes okay So you can customize with this field.

That's a field if we look over to the side.

Just like remember that field I put on there for first name back on the other letter.

Well this is just kind of off to the side and I just have this new technology letter.

It's not going to go on to the letter itself.

I'll just color that bright just so it stands out.

Save my change and there it is off to the side.

But anything I change that on to, I'll just change it to XYZ.

As soon as I click out of the field, we just received the new Phonak XYZ hearing aid.

After reviewing your records, we believe the XYZ can help you, etc.

So I think you get the idea that you could put these merge fields on.

Let's go back home and see how we can find out what a merge field is.

So on the home screen, it's a pretty busy screen because there's a ton of stuff that's going on here.

But you can go into layout mode, edit layout, if you have sufficient rights, that is.

And then you could see right here, this says date of birth with no spaces.

I can even double click it if I can't actually read the whole field.

Let's say it's truncated and squished, I can't see it.

Well, there I can see that it's not just date of birth.

It's not that other date of birth that we saw up here somewhere.

But we can also see the table that it's in.

Again, I can't teach you to be an expert here, but it's important to know that there's a variety of tables, just like spreadsheets in Excel.

And you just need to make sure that you're merging from the, for example, the AIDS table for hearing devices doesn't have a field called date of birth.

So if you were in that table, you'd say, oh my gosh, I can't find date of birth anywhere.

I see date fit, but that's not appropriate.

So there's a lot more to learning how to do this than we can put in a video here.

You can find a field just by double clicking it.

But this 1 is a little hard to read, name suffix, and I'm sure some of these are a little bit hard to read because they're long names and they may not fit on there.

So that's how you can find out what a merge field is.

I didn't make any changes so it didn't ask me to save that there.

We can look at this advanced letter and there's our letter that we created first.

This is the new technology letter that we kind of messed around a little bit with.

See all HearForm Audiology Software transcripts on Youtube

Letters Modification Advanced